Recent Comments

Chuck Smith: Emily, I hope you take a look at my recent CYOA story developed at chooseyourstory.com titled "The Adventures of Phoebe McGee." The tools provided on read more

Keith Nemitz: Thank you for spotlighting these games. I think it was Chris Crawford who originally pushed for meaningful choices. But, as you say, choice alone isn't read more

About GameSetWatch

GameSetWatch.com is the alt.video game weblog and sister site of Gamasutra.com. It is dedicated to collecting curious links and media for offbeat and oft-ignored games from consoles old and new, as well as from the digital download, iOS, and indie spaces.

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at two multiple-choice games, Choice of Dragons and Choice of Broadsides, by Choice of Games.]

I have a love-hate relationship with multiple-choice interactive stories. (I'm talking about the kind of thing commonly called CYOA-style or "Choose Your Own Adventure" style, but that name is associated with the publisher of the original books, and Choice of Games uses the term multiple-choice game instead.)

On the one hand, I like story-heavy games, and I'm all in favor of more games that explore the potential of text. Moreover, while I love interactive fiction, I realize that the parser puts a lot of demands on the novice player, and that poses a serious accessibility problem. Giving the player a straightforward list of options -- each of them guaranteed to advance the story in some way -- certainly makes things move faster.

On the other hand, I've tended to find multiple-choice stories deeply unsatisfying.

Some of this has to do with structural decisions made by early authors in this format. The original Choose Your Own Adventure books were often full of stupid dead ends, places where taking the left path rather than the right led to an instant death room with no preparation. This kept the number of major branch points low, but at the cost of removing any kind of significant agency from the player. At worst, the player was not meaningfully directing the story; I controlled outcomes as little as if I were flipping a coin to decide which branch to follow.

Choice of Games is a company writing games in ChoiceScript, a language designed for writing multiple-choice games with a small number of variables, mostly RPG-like character stats. So far they have published two games, "Choice of Dragons" and "Choice of Broadsides" -- the first a somewhat generic fairy-tale-esque game in which you kidnap princesses and accumulate gold, the second a Napoleonic-era naval career simulator. Their manifesto defends text-based gaming and argues for a game style that is all about meaningful choices.

I find it hard to argue with that in theory. In practice, I enjoyed but was not overwhelmed by either of them, even though the underlying mechanic addresses most of my traditional problems with multiple-choice storytelling.

The larger plot arcs suffer a bit from a confusion about the nature of "meaningful choice." The designers rightly argue that "several different things can make a choice meaningful":

"In some cases, it determines the flow of the game from then on, even whether the protagonist lives or dies. In other cases, the choices are meaningful because they help the player explore and define who their character is. What makes your character tick can be among the most meaningful sorts of choices, even if it has no direct effect on the outcomes of the game."

This is good stuff, especially the realization that a choice doesn't have to cause a branch immediately to count as meaningful. Some of my favorite choices in games have been about character motivation and backstory, from choosing a motivating trauma for Commander Shepard in Mass Effect to answering the extremely creepy motive questions in Victor Gijsbers' The Baron. And the games do deliver on that theoretical premise, by offering a number of occasions when you can decide why you're taking a particular action.

Meaningful choices also depend somewhat on the player's degree of engagement in the story, though, and that's where both Choice of Dragons and Choice of Broadsides fell down for me (though the latter was the better of the two).

Both pieces have an RPG-like attitude towards the initial stats, allowing the player to create a character who is brutal or subtle, brainy or brawny. That leaves a lot of freedom to shape the avatar, but it also means that choices within the story have to be very broadly drawn in order to encompass actions that fall under these different rubrics. It also means that the protagonist can't come to the story with much personality of his own: so much is left up to the player that the results of player choice are a bit generic.

As a result, when I played each game for the first time, I found myself making choices that are at heart the same choices I make in every RPG: strong and brutish or small and cunning? (I always go with cunning, personally.) Then I replayed, trying antithetical strategies. Choice of Broadsides does offer some setting-specific skill trade-offs -- whether to train in sailing, fencing, or leadership skills, for instance -- but even there the choices felt like they mapped without much difficulty to similar choices I've made in many another RPG.

The catch is that these multiple-choice games do not offer the big open world to explore and the opportunities for environmental and emergent narrative that one finds in, say, Fable 2 or Fallout 3. RPG-style stats don't correspond at all well to the level of storytelling and agency at work in a multiple choice game.

Multiple-choice games in ChoiceScript could offer a much stronger narrative voice, more surprising statistics, and a deeper sense of connection with the game world if they established a more strongly-defined protagonist at the outset. Instead of asking, "Are you tough or are you clever?", they might ask, "Why are you seeking revenge on this character?" More particular choices are typically more meaningful than big open ones.

So far I see no reason to think that ChoiceScript couldn't produce more effective multiple-choice stories. It isn't, and isn't meant to be, an especially powerful programming language; it has about the same range of features for storytelling as Ren'Py, minus the mechanisms for displaying images.

I'm also encouraged by Choice of Games' decision to explore a genre that doesn't appear much in the conventional game scene with Choice of Broadsides, which was more interesting all around than Choice of Dragons and did some interesting things with the recurring villain/friend character of Villeneuve.

I see potential for their future work, especially if they move away from RPG-like avatar creation toward stories that explore a particular theme or character in depth.

(Disclosure: These games are free to play. I have had no commercial interactions with the authors at the time of writing.)

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She also contracts for story and design work with game developers from time to time, and will disclose conflicts with story subjects if any exist. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

2 Comments

Thank you for spotlighting these games. I think it was Chris Crawford who originally pushed for meaningful choices. But, as you say, choice alone isn't enough. For me, context is critical. I see in IF a struggle between brevity and context. Modern writing is chained by a need to be brief. We try to cram who, where, what, why, and how into three sentence paragraphs, for fear of losing the audience with more involved rendering. Short text speeds the pace. Gotta keep the up the excitement, with occasional breaks for a deep breath. This is a problem for setting the stage for a meaningful choice.

If you haven't already played it, try 'Kings of Dragon Pass'. It does a very cool thing of using a first layer of gameplay to build the world and a second layer of interactive stories. These stories' meaningful choices give mythic immersion because the first layer binds you to the world, and the second layer puts you into challenging, personal situations. It is a terrific example of powerful context making decisions more meaningful. The storytelling is really gripping.

Your article is especially helpful to me, as I was writing a bit for my next game, and for a break I read GSW. I race to play 'Broadsides', (big H.H. fan here), and then I am marveling at pages that look similar (except for genre) to what I just wrote!

Emily, I hope you take a look at my recent CYOA story developed at chooseyourstory.com titled "The Adventures of Phoebe McGee." The tools provided on the site include variables, items, and scripts that all interact in sophisticated ways. The home page for the story is at http://www.ksu.edu/wwparent/story/Phoebe/. I think you might find the conversation with one of the characters interesting. This was my first try, and I learned a lot about what the system can do. So I'm looking forward to making my next story even stronger. Thanks.